Chapter 71 - Ritual (Patreon)

Zeke’s mace slammed into the priest’s face, shattering its skull into a million bloody pieces. It dropped to the slime-coated stone floor, but it was soon replaced by two more of the robed lizardkin. He snapped a kick out, sending one careening into the wall. It hit with a satisfying crunch of broken bones, but Zeke hardly noticed. At only four-feet-tall, the creatures were small and light enough that sending them flying through the air had become trivial. It was a good thing, too, because there were so many of them that if he couldn’t dispatch them with a single swing, he’d have been overwhelmed by the swarm.

Slowly, he made his way through the mass of scaly bodies, felling dozens of the creatures for every foot he gained. Thankfully, their numbers were finite, and eventually, he managed to thin them out enough that he got a modicum of peace. The monstrous creatures were frenzied, each of them foaming at the mouth. They cared little for their own survival, throwing themselves at him with reckless abandon. There were no tactics, save for the odd curse, which he’d already learned to unravel with relative ease. It still took a few seconds of concentration, but he was getting faster and faster with each attempt.

Finally, after almost an hour’s worth of straight battle, Zeke felled the last of the monsters. He stood there, spattered with green blood and unidentifiable viscera, with his breath coming in great heaves. He hadn’t come through the battle unscathed, and his body, visible beneath the ragged and ripped remains of his secondhand, leather armor, bore a multitude of thin, red lines where gaping wounds had once been. They’d been sewn shut by the constant surge of vitality provided by [Leech Strike], but the healing power seemed almost sentient, prioritizing the worst of his wounds and leaving the lesser injuries for later. Still, he knew that even with the natural healing provided by his own vitality, his skin would soon return to a flawless state.

Assuming he survived his foray into the sewers, of course.

As he made the rounds, looting the hundreds of lizardkin, Zeke couldn’t help but wonder where all the creatures had come from. Were the sewers really so vast that they could house so many? He’d already worked his way through three of the cavernous rooms, and in each one, he’d been confronted by a hundred or more of the monsters. Their numbers seemed endless.

But at least they gave decent experience. The loot was terrible, though. Only one in four of them gave a beast core, but by killing over a thousand of the monsters, he’d managed a sizable collection of the marble-sized rocks. So, at least the wholesale slaughter hadn’t been for naught.

The old Zeke, the one who’d lived on Earth, might have felt guilty about the bloody swathe he’d cut through the lizardkin population. But in this new world, it was kill or be killed. He’d learned that in the troll caves, and whatever hesitation he’d felt about killing had long since been subverted by a simple survival instinct. Even when he’d killed the Crystal Spider assassins, he’d felt little more than anger, with only the slightest twinge of regret that he’d been pushed into it.

He wasn’t a pacifist. He wouldn’t turn the other cheek. If someone tried to kill him or anyone he cared about, he’d return the favor. Was that normal? Zeke had no idea. But Abby seemed to feel the same way, at least. It was one of the reasons he liked her. She didn’t hesitate. Nor did she whine about doing what was necessary. She simply did it, then moved on.

Perhaps it would be different if they were faced with a difficult, less black-and-white situation. But Zeke wouldn’t know the answer to that question until he was faced with such circumstances. Until then, he felt entirely justified in his current philosophy.

After he’d looted the monsters, Zeke inspected the huge room, knowing full well what he’d find. Sure enough, at the center of the room, where an altar had been erected, there was a pile of human bones. Some were adult sized, but there were plenty that had clearly come from children – which only cemented his already formidable resolve.

According to what Zeke had overheard from the guards as he’d entered the sewers, a not-insignificant number of adventurers had already tried to tackle this particular problem. It wasn’t entirely out of the question to think that the adult-sized bones belonged to his predecessors.

That, as much as the deaths themselves, ignited his anger. When he’d first gotten the mission, Zeke had thought Einar had simply wanted to inconvenience him by sending him into the sewers – a less-than-desirable destination, to put it lightly. However, Zeke was beginning to believe that the guild elder had intended something far more insidious. At level fourteen, very few people could’ve survived the hordes of lizardkin, much less done anything about it.

No – Einar had sent him to his own execution. Zeke was certain of it. It was only because Zeke was so atypical that he’d managed to survive. The man had tried to kill him, and all because of his wounded pride. It made him sick that a person like that was given any sort of authority.

But regardless of why he’d been given the mission, Zeke still had a job to do. Children and adventurers were still being killed, and for some as-yet-unknown reason. Certainly, the altar suggested that they’d been sacrificed, but Zeke had little context for what such a sacrifice might enable. All he knew was that it was bad news, and he was the only person around to stop whatever the lizardkin were trying to do. So, he pushed his anger aside and continued on his quest.

It didn’t take Zeke long to finish looting the lizardkin corpses and find his way to the other side of the room, where another tunnel led deeper into the sewers. He wasn’t certain, given that his sense of direction had gotten all turned around during the battle, but Zeke thought he recognized something of a pattern. As he made his way to the next cavernous chamber, his suspicions were confirmed – they’d been arranged into a diamond shape, and past the horde of lizardkin, he could see an extra exit going into the center of the diamond.

His destination was clear. He only needed to take care of the rabid monsters in between. So, Zeke rolled his shoulders before striding into the room.

The moment he came into the dim light provided by the torches scattered throughout the chamber, the lizardkin went insane. They came at him in a wave of scales, gnashing teeth, and razor-sharp claws. He met them with the generous application of blunt force, his mace smashing through them with ease.

The slaughter was epic, but it was also mindless. Whether it was one of the robed priests or their warrior brethren, Zeke dispatched them without thought. He took injuries, but with the vast amount of damage he was doing, whatever wounds they managed to inflict were healed within moments. He was a juggernaut of death, and there was nothing the monsters could do to stop him.

Not that that knowledge stopped them from trying, of course. No – they kept coming until the very last them lay twitching in the throes of death and Zeke was surrounded by a pile of scaly corpses. Even Zeke, who was no stranger to outright carnage, found his stomach roiling at the sight. The smell alone was enough to induce nausea.

Zeke very nearly chose to simply leave the pile of corpses and move on, but it just seemed wrong to leave loot on the table. So, he laboriously made his way through the remains and came away with a significant number of beast cores.

“God, I’d give anything for a freaking shower right now,” he muttered before remembering the ring he’d bought. He inspected it:

Ring of Cleansing (G) – A magical item that can clean inanimate objects once per day.

Zeke considered using it to clean his clothes and what was left of his leather armor, but decided to hold off until he finished the mission and found the surface. Using it now would only mean that he’d only get a temporary reprieve from the blood and muck. Sighing, he picked a sliver of lizard skin from his beard before inspecting the altar in the center of the room. Like the ones he’d previously encountered, it was covered with dead bodies. However, unlike the others, the corpses on this altar were only slightly decayed.

Briefly, Zeke wondered if he should do something with them. After all, they were human beings, and they deserved to be put to rest. But how? It wasn’t like he could dig a grave in the middle of the sewers. Nor did he have the means or the desire to build a pyre, and even if he did, there was probably enough methane in the air to make that an extremely unwise decision. So, he regrettably left them on the altar before moving on to the tunnel that he suspected would lead him to the center and final room.

As he traversed that tunnel, Zeke felt something unidentifiable in the air. Once, back on Earth, his hometown had had the misfortune of being in the direct path of a hurricane coming off the Gulf of Mexico. Just before the deadly storm came on shore, Zeke had been outside, finishing up the preparations. It had felt like the world was holding its breath, like it was preparing for something truly terrifying. Even knowing what was coming, Zeke had felt a sense of morbid anticipation, an excitement to see the true power of nature.

What he felt as he walked down that tunnel was similar. Something powerful was coming. A force of nature. And though he was frightened, Zeke couldn’t wait to see what it was. Excitement overwhelmed both his fear and his good sense, and he hurried forward, his footsteps echoing through the tunnel.

He skidded to a stop as the tunnel opened up into yet another cavernous chamber, this one far larger than any that had come before. However, instead of a horde of lizardkin, it was populated by only a few of the creatures. A quick count put their number at thirteen, and they were all circled around a large pool of glowing sludge, maybe twenty feet across. Feeding into that pool were four canals, each of which came from the direction of one of the rooms at the corners of the diamond.

Zeke could feel the power coming from both the canals and the pool. What’s more, he could identify it. Vitality. Life force. Whatever you wanted to call it, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that it was the collected life force of the sacrificed children and adventurers. But it wasn’t pure. It had been corrupted by the sewer’s filth, which had transformed it into something else.

Something powerful enough to stand the hair on the back of Zeke’s neck on end.

Before Zeke could make a plan, he’d started running forward. Hefting his mace, he shot toward the circled lizardkin, who paid him absolutely no mind. Instead, their hissing voices rose to a crescendo. The air tingled with magic, and the pool roiled with energy. Just as Zeke finally reached the first robed lizardkin, a huge crack echoed across the chamber.

Zeke was thrown from his feet by a powerful shockwave, his breath driven from his chest as he landed on his back. He skidded for a dozen feet until the force dissipated, and he sprang to his feet, the twinging pain in his side telling him that he had multiple broken ribs.

He didn’t have long to inspect his injuries, though, because the gathered priests were already on their way. With hissing screams, they threw themselves at him with even less caution than their brethren. Zeke went through them like a scythe through wheat, and soon, he was alone in the room.

Or mostly alone, at least. Something had begun to emerge from the pool.

“Shit,” he breathed as the thing crawled from the sludge.

Never was an expletive so accurate. The monster was humanoid in shape, at least twelve feet tall, with thick, tree-sized limbs and a stocky body. But more importantly, it was either covered by or comprised of excrement. Or mud.

“God, I hope it’s mud,” Zeke muttered to himself.

The monster opened its glowing green eyes before letting out a thunderous roar. Flecks of mud flew from its cavernous mouth.

It was definitely mud, right? Foul-smelling mud. In a sewer, Zeke thought, though he had more than a little difficulty convincing even himself.

The monster charged.

Zeke did the same.

When they clashed, Zeke realized something very, very important. The monster wasn’t solid. In fact, when his mace connected, it merely sank into the horribly muck that comprised the monster’s body, and it took all his strength to pull it out. In that brief moment, it wrapped its thick fingers around his waist, picked him up, and tossed him across the room.

As he flew through the air, Zeke was forced to acknowledge one simple fact.

That’s definitely not mud, he thought before he slammed into the wall, the impact cracking the stone.